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MONTREAL — The Quebec version of the ice bucket challenge was delivered Monday night in a 90-minute documentary that featured a sombre Lucien Bouchard pouring cold water over the sovereignty movement and, retrospectively, on his own political career.

Over the course of 22 hours of filmed conversations, the former Quebec premier looked back on his leading role in the 1995 referendum and on his subsequent failure to advance sovereignty over his years in provincial office.

Based on the edited results of those long-awaited public reminiscences, Bouchard found little comfort in contemplating the road travelled through the rear-view mirror.

The resulting Télé-Québec documentary amounts to a bitter brew of regrets and recriminations.

In Bouchard’s eyes, the bridges that he burned with three successive parties, the federal Tories, the Parti Québécois and the Bloc Québécois, inevitably stand out.

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He initiated each of his political breakups and yet sounds aggrieved by the fact that those he dumped still hold a grudge.

But he is hardly grudge-free himself.

In particular Bouchard is visibly angry that a vocal section of the sovereignty movement feels that he, as premier, did not pursue sovereignty aggressively enough to bridge the gap between the close 1995 “no” vote and a “yes” victory.

He says that after the referendum he found that his “magic” no longer operated on the Quebec public. “The spring of sovereignty was broken,” he argues.

Almost in the same breath, he describes those who put the single-minded quest for Quebec’s independence above all else as “enemies.”

He suggests that his referendum ally, then-premier Jacques Parizeau, was more interested in using him to get a “yes” vote than in having him act as his lead negotiator with Canada in the aftermath of a sovereigntist victory.

He blames Parizeau’s refusal to contemplate a second referendum to put the results of those negotiations to Quebecers for the close defeat of the sovereigntist camp.

Overall, Bouchard comes across as a politician for whom arriving at one’s destination is the only measure of the success of a political voyage.

On the Quebec/Canada issue his course led to a dead end. On that basis, he apparently concurs with the assessment of one of his grown-up sons who — he says — once summed up his political career as that of a loser.

To listen to Bouchard, one would be tempted to conclude that his road trip was essentially a waste of high-octane political fuel. And yet his record as premier suggests otherwise.

At a time when successive Quebec premiers do not seem to be able to implement a hike in tuition fees or to reform municipal pensions without courting a divisive public backlash, he balanced the books without tearing up the province’s social fabric.

Even as he was setting Quebec on that more frugal fiscal course, Bouchard presided over the most significant expansion of its social safety net since the 1970s. Both the province’s universal child care system and its pharmacare program are part of his legacy.

And then he was the last PQ leader to deliver a governing majority to the sovereigntist movement and a rare premier who bequeathed a party to his successor that was riding high in the polls.

The timing of Monday’s broadcast coincided with the ongoing meltdown of the Bloc Québécois.

Bouchard seized the opportunity to put even more distance between himself and his former sovereigntist associates.

He has been arguing for some years that the continued pursuit of sovereignty has become a dangerous and almost certainly futile distraction from more pressing Quebec priorities.

At the media screening of the documentary, Bouchard added that the federal party he founded 24 years ago was never meant to last long and that by overstaying its welcome the Bloc was weakening Quebec’s hand in the federation.

The documentary was already in the making some time before Quebec went to the polls last spring.

Had the PQ secured a majority government, its broadcast this week would have dashed the notion that Bouchard would ever want to put his shoulder to the wheel of another referendum.

With the PQ leaderless and in opposition, the documentary essentially offered a timely lesson on the ephemeral political potency of charisma.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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